


Beginning

by Winterling42



Series: I am also a We [1]
Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Human, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Sense8 (TV) Fusion, Gen, Gods as Human
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-20
Updated: 2019-07-20
Packaged: 2020-07-09 02:01:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 833
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19879762
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Winterling42/pseuds/Winterling42
Summary: Critical Role campaign 2 sense8 AU! Melora births a new cluster, and she can only hope they're strong enough to survive everything that being senseate entails...





	Beginning

Wind hummed through the silver meadow, rustling the grass to reveal the woman gasping and curled on a heavy blanket in the center. At first she was alone, her labored breathing the only human sound for miles. But the grass waved, the wind stirred, and six others crouched or sat or stood around her. 

“Let me take some of the pain,” Sarenrae crouched with both hands pressed to the ground, wearing her paramedic’s uniform (somewhere in her head, a radio blared as the ambulance waited for a call). 

“Can you see them yet?” Bahamut never tired of seeking out new senseates and clusters, despite their low survival rate. He sat with one hand on the mother’s shoulder, holding as tight as he could.

“Everyone just give her a moment.” Erathis shooed the others back, took her lover by the hands. “You’ll know when the time is right, Melora,” she said. From underneath her curtain of chestnut hair, Melora smiled for a moment, then groaned and pressed her hands to her head. She still clung tight to Erathis, and despite the pained whine in her breathing, pulled herself to a sitting position before saying, “Oh,  _ there  _ they are.”

Later, she wouldn’t be quite able to recall the surroundings of her new cluster, though their faces were imprinted on her memory. In the haze of pain and exaltation that came with birth, she could only ride the immense, earth-shattering love of any mother for her children. 

One of them was eating dinner in a ship’s galley, a shorter man, with patches of white splashed across his dark face. Melora watched him pause in the middle of a sentence, turn to face where she stood in the doorway. She smiled at him, and then was gone to...

A lavishly appointed suite, where two beautiful women talked and laughed and snacked on honey-coated pastries. Melora blew a kiss to the younger of the two, a chubby woman with hair so black it gleamed blue in their lamplight. The woman opened her mouth to speak and...

She was outside of a bar, neon red lights gleaming off of wet asphalt. A much thinner woman, with the dark angry eyes of a drunk, glared up at her from the curb. Idly she ran her sleeve across her face to wipe away a slow trickle of blood, watching Melora like a cat with a mouse. 

But it was only one turn of the wheel, and Melora spun around to see...a sprawling farmhouse kitchen, made for many more people than the single man standing there. Taller even than Bahamut, with a long pink mohawk mostly bleached by the sun, he dropped the bowl of peas he was carrying when he saw her in the corner. Before he could do more than widen his eyes she was gone, swept away to...

A mostly empty jail cell, dark except for the single bar of florescent light in the hallway. A man, unhealthily thin even under his layers of sweaters, spun to face her with the speed of someone behind hunted. Melora had only enough time to reach out a calming hand before...

She stood in a forest, where only the moon lit the unmarked road. The shriek of rubber on asphalt startled her back a few steps, and she saw a ghostly woman half-hidden behind the headlight of her motorcycle. She was difficult to see, behind the yellow light and her dark helmet, but they knew her anyway. “Oh,” Kord said, and they spoke with one voice. “It’s you.” The woman let out a shocked breath, but Melora blinked her eyes and was gone to...

The bright music of a carnival, flashing lights and colors that spun dizzying circles in the reflections of two wide-bladed swords. A darkly tanned Pakistani man pretended to fumble one of the blades, to the shrieking delight of his audience. He grinned up a Melora, and for a moment something black and unsettling moved behind his eyes. He cut his hand trying to catch the second sword, and she felt the pain as a dim flash before the wheel turned one last time to show her...

A woman, huddled in the back of  _ another _ prison cell, green rain jacket pulled low over her face. Melora sat beside her for just a moment, watching, and it took so long for the woman to notice her that Melora wondered if she’d somehow caught one of her cluster asleep. But no, she turned, and Melora saw sparkling green eyes, a face recently made thin by hardship, and a few escaped strands of dark hair plastered to her face by water. 

And then they were gone, all of them, connected only by the faintest of threads. Tomorrow, she could follow them back to their source and introduce herself properly. For now, Melora sighed and laid back on her blanket, pulling Erathis with one hand and Kord with the other. She was tired, so tired, and her cluster laid down around her. 


End file.
